Ever read Ezekiel all the way through before? I haven't. I have not ventured much into the angry and confusing world of the Old Testament prophets where all I thought I'd see is a story on repeat of an angry God condemning Israel and surrounding nations. I love the typical Protestant image of God as being loving and merciful no matter what we have done, and I find most of that in the New Testament. It feels safer there - I don't have to deal as much with God killing people left and right, or with having to try to justify and explain that to my horrified, merciful little heart.
We've been going through Romans in our Gateway College Bible study however, and I've had to wrestle with plainly stated truths of predestination as well as free will, and passages that talk about "vessels of wrath" and about those among Israel "who were chosen and obtained it," and how "the rest were hardened." Is this the merciful, forgiving God that I thought I knew? It's the age-old question of how a loving God could send people to hell, one that I try to avoid because of difficult answers I don't want to hear.
But as God has taken me slowly through Scripture over the past couple of months, He showed me this painful idea that I have seen substantiated again and again in His Word: my God is glorified both by His loving grace and His just wrath. Perhaps for some of you, this idea is less than groundbreaking, but for me, it shook my world. He then began to clarify this idea for me in Ezekiel today, and I was floored, abhorred, then awed by what I found.
This prophetic book began with Ezekiel explaining his breathtaking, frightening vision of God coming to him in a cloud, radiating heat and surrounded by powerful, horrific creatures that constantly give Him glory. God then commissions Ezekiel to speak His words to the Israelites, calling them to repentance and urging them to remember that He is their true God. He commands this prophet, saying, "Speak my words to them whether they listen or not, for they are a rebellious people." He presses on this man that he must give them a chance to turn from their sin, even though the Lord knows they will not (3:7). He later says, "He who hears, let him hear; and he who refuses, let him refuse" - God allows them to choose their own way, even if it is the way of destruction. What I see here is that God gives us a way out - even when He knows we won't take it.
The Israelites refuse God's mercy, and He allows them to do so. Then in response to the idols and "abominations" done in His holy sanctuary, He allows them to experience the consequences they chose for themselves. What follows is a horrific description of how the plague, famine and the sword will come, and how fathers and sons will be forced to eat one another (5:10). But then I saw something striking and humbling - God reveals His own pain in Ezekiel 6:9: "Then those of you who escape will remember Me among the nations to which they will be carried captive, how I have been hurt by their adulterous hearts which turned away from Me, and by their eyes which played the harlot after their idols..." We, friends, have the ability to hurt the God of the universe! We cause Him a pain similar to what we feel when we have been cheated on and abandoned (see Hosea)!
While I've theoretically known this, I don't think I've ever seen God express His pain, only His wrathful response. I think most of us who have followed the Lord for a while know about this, but then we have the nerve to condemn God for His just reaction to us willfully inflicting heartache on our Maker. We think we should be able to belittle and deny God as the majestic Authority in our lives and experience none of the repercussions. We expect God to honor our conceptions of our rights to be able to do and say and believe whatever we want without His attempt to correct the lies, arrogance and rebellion we walk in.
And that's just it - God declares His reasons for His drastic actions by saying over and over again throughout Ezekiel and the rest of Scripture: "Thus you will know that I am the Lord." That's it. He urges us to take our heads out of the sand, open our eyes, and know truth. But if we slap away His hand of mercy over and over again, we don't even accept the mercy we demand that He tries to give us! So He shows us the truth of His glory the hard way - through His powerful, destructive wrath.
But here's the hope in all of this...God says later in Ezekiel that He has "no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies" (18:32). By contrast, Ephesians 1 says He planned our redemption, our way out by means of His painful sacrifice, with pleasure. While He is glorified by both His grace and His justice, He takes delight only in our salvation. So the gravity and horror of the punishment that He inflicted on His people Israel, the same punishment we all deserve, He took on Himself so that history would not solely be the picture of our rebellion and His wrath. He inflicted this same wrath on His own Son so that the image of the glory of His powerful love would outshine that of His regretful anger. Jesus Christ chose to experience the overwhelming wrath that He knew so well so that we would not have to experience it. All we have to do is recognize that He IS the Lord, and accept His sacrifice as covering our own blatant sin.
If you ask me, that's a story of mercy right there.
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